The Democrats have had the equivalent of a sex change operation over Russia. It would make for an hilarious black comedy were it not for the dangerous implications for the safety of the human race — not to mention the increasingly disastrous miseducation of our youth.
In fact, this sex change is so extreme it should make even a card-carrying LGBTQQP2SAA blush.
Take our erstwhile senator from Vermont, Comrade Bernie, even now off touring the country with the latest “progressive” fave, a socialist with the apparent knowledge base of one of those clueless dimbulbs chosen for satiric man-on-the-street TV interviews.
Bernie, as many know, is a man who picked the Soviet Union for his honeymoon. As one who paid two lengthy visits to the USSR at about the same time on “cultural exchanges,” I can assure you that most of us would rather spend our honeymoons at a toxic waste dump, which a significant part of that country resembled and still does.
Not only that, on those two visits — and also on two subsequent trips post-Communism — I noticed the most obvious income disparity, something Senator Sanders is supposed to abhor. Yes, we have pretty wretched poverty in Appalachia and the inner cities, but this was pervasive, with all the clichés about empty stores with babushka ladies on breadlines one hundred percent accurate. I saw it for myself from Khanty-Mansiysk, Siberia to Simferopol, Crimea. It’s slightly better now under oligarchic capitalism, but still nothing like the West.
It’s one thing to excuse the naive idealism of Lincoln Steffens, who returned from Moscow in 1918 to tell us, “I have seen the future and it works.” But Sanders went on his Soviet honeymoon in 1988, fifteen years after the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. How romantic.
If there were ever a place where elites (nomenklatura) ruled and the sainted proletariat got the short end of the proverbial stick, it was the USSR. Further, all the visitors to the Soviet Union, and many later, were under constant surveillance by intelligence agencies. I know I was — oh, how I was — since I was approached by the KGB to “help them,” a moment as terrifying as any in my life. (You can read about it here.) Spying has been a Russian constant since the czars.
Only willfully blind true believers could have ignored all of that, but Bernie Sanders did.
And now he’s yammering on that Trump is betraying us to Russia. As if.
But he’s not half as bad or half as hypocritical as ex-CIA chief John O. Brennan.
Brennan — it is well known and he admits it — voted for Communist Party USA chief Gus Hall in the 1976 presidential election. Talk about sex change operations. He excuses that as kind of youthful indiscretion — he was in his early twenties — and evidently many (including Obama, who gave him his job) believed him or said they did.
But I was only a few years older than Brennan then and remember those days well, since I too was on the left. I was even an acquaintance of such notorious characters as Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden and knew dozens of people who, to one degree or another, sympathized with them. Yet not a single person I can recall voted for Gus Hall or even remotely considered it. Hall was a Stalinist, for crissakes! He was anathema, everything the young people of the so-called New Left were rebelling against then — and, in this one case at least, justifiably so. The mass-murdering crimes of Stalin were already common knowledge.
Years later, when I read Brennan was among the minuscule .07 percent who actually voted for Hall, I was astonished. How could such a person end up director of the CIA? I mean, I’m all for redemption and everything, but there are limits. Voting for a Stalinist candidate as late as 1976 would be akin to a personality disorder, almost like voting for Satan. It’s one thing to forgive Brennan for this, hard as that may be, but there is something seriously unsettling about putting him at the helm of our most famous intelligence agency. (Other questions have arisen about Brennan’s Middle East connections.)
But now we have him leading the charge against Trump, accusing the president of actual treason in his dealings with Putin, the very thing Brennan’s former hero Hall directly advocated. It’s enough to make a sane man paranoid.
This is all obviously part of the great game of “Russia” that has dominated our culture for nearly two years, a kind of media- generated obsessive-compulsive disorder. (Mentioning Russia has become the cable TV equivalent of the uncontrollable washing of hands in a Dickens novel.) This has to end — and now — or we’ll all go crazy, paranoid or not.
To do this, what we need more than ever is for Trump to exercise his executive authority and order the release of all the documents pertaining to the Hilary email and Russia investigations that the DOJ is refusing to produce. I have heard the president’s attorneys oppose this for fear of some bogus obstruction charge. I’m afraid it’s too late for that. The public has to see it all — and not, alas, through the filtered eyes of an inspector general. Trust is gone. We need the originals. And no phony redactions, please.
Meanwhile, the Democrats’ evolving Russia Derangement Syndrome — a viral mutation of TDS — is indeed a psychological disease worthy of inclusion in the DSM, especially since it has nothing whatever to do with Russia. Russia is always the same. The Democrats are not. They have had a sex change operation.
ENVOI: It’s worth remembering, however, that many of those who have such operations often have second thoughts and want them reversed. In this case, the Dems might be well advised to do so, go back to their old appeasing ways that began under Reagan and reached their apotheosis under Obama. Their new found belligerence is clearly not catching fire. The public seems mighty bored with the whole Russia business and judges it completely irrelevant to their lives, a mere asterisk, less than one percent in the latest polling of important campaign issues. Who can blame them?
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